The Bloody Crossroads

‘What’s worse,’ asked the comedian, ‘leaving a swearword on somebody’s answer-phone or tacitly supporting Adolph Hitler when he took charge of the Third Reich?’ Russell Brand was speaking on his radio show on 25 October 2008 – a week after he and Jonathan Ross had left a series of lewd messages on the answering machine of ‘Manuel’ actor Andrew Sachs. […]

For Plato, the ideal city-state was one in which ‘philosopher-kings’ would take charge; ‘Unless philosophers bear kingly rule in cities,’ he has Socrates say in The Republic, ‘there will be no respite from evil.’ In reality, however, the history of intellectuals in power has not been a happy one; indeed, it seems that theoretical acumen and practical ability are often […]

On the morning of 6 November 2000, Ken Crew was finishing his regular swim off the popular, and usually placid, beach of North Cottesloe, a 500-metre stretch of sand in a well-to-do western suburb of Perth. It was around 6.30, and the 49-year-old Crew, a businessman and father of three, was wading in waist-deep water, when a 5-metre great white […]